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Shadow Activity and Unemployment in a Depressed Labor Market

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Author Info
Tito Boeri
Pietro Garibaldi

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Abstract

This paper studies the border between shadow employment and unemployment, and argues that the two macroeconomic phenomena are two faces of the same coin, in the sense that any policy aimed at reducing the former will increase the latter. Theoretically, it proposes and solves a matching model of the labor market, where shadow employment emerges in equilibrium as the endogenous response of firms and workers who fell overburdened by taxes and regulations. While the model we propose neatly rationalize the labor market trade off implied by "shadow reducing policies", it suggests that economies with low unemployment turnover should be characterized also by low turnover along the shadow margins. Empirically, the paper uses matched records across LFSs (Labor Force Survey) to assess whether turnover over shadow employment is more stagnant in the high unemployment region of the Italian Mezzogiorno. Since existing estimates of shadow employment are silent on labor market flows and on the relation between shadow activity and main labor market aggregates, we perform original empirical work on the border between employment, unemployment and inactivity, and we find that Italian shadow employment has longer duration in regions with lower unemployment turnover.

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Paper provided by IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University in its series Working Papers with number 177.

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Handle: RePEc:igi:igierp:177

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Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. Saint-Paul, Gilles, 1995. "The High Unemployment Trap," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 110(2), pages 527-50, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  2. Edgar L. Feige, 2005. "The Underground Economy And The Currency Enigma," Macroeconomics 0502004, EconWPA. [Downloadable!]
  3. Dixon, Huw, 1999. "Controversy: On the Use of the 'Hidden Economy' Estimates," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 109(456), pages F335-37, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  4. Tito Boeri & Axel Börsch-Supan & Guido Tabellini, 2001. "Would you like to shrink the welfare state? A survey of European citizens," Economic Policy, CEPR, CES, MSH, vol. 16(32), pages 7-50, 04. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  5. Friedrich Schneider & Dominik H. Enste, 2000. "Shadow Economies: Size, Causes, and Consequences," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 38(1), pages 77-114, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  6. Kolm, Ann-Sofie & Larsen, Birthe, 2001. "Wages, Unemployment, and the Underground Economy," Working Paper Series 2001:8, Uppsala University, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
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  7. Garibaldi, Pietro, 1999. "Search Unemployment with Advance Notice," CEPR Discussion Papers 2164, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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This page was last updated on 2009-11-23.

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